The Post-Baby Conversation: What New Parents Need to Say to Each Other

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Preface

When my first child, Heidi, was 20 months old and I was 4 months pregnant with our second child, my husband Stewart and I had a transforming conversation. That conversation marked the end of a period of intense mental and emotional confusion for me, and the beginning of a fulfilling post-baby relationship for us. Until that time, our postbaby relationship had been struggling: there were powerful new emotions, unspoken expectations and relentless demands. I felt that we were two people adrift at sea in the dark, waiting for something or someone to tell us what had happened to our previous life. We were waiting for instructions as to how we could navigate ourselves back to the music and magic of our pre-baby days. Each of us wanted a glimpse of the person we’d married and to remember what was so special about them. We wanted to have fun and laugh together again.

The transforming conversation took place one evening after Heidi had been put to bed. I was nervously and excitedly sitting on the couch in front of the television. Stewart was reading the paper and also trying to listen to what was on the television. I said that I had something really important to tell him and that what I had to say signified a real change in my life. When he finally looked across at me (and I admit he looked a little fearful), I remember telling him that I had finally accepted my new job – my role as a mother – and all the work that role entailed, and that I was happy (well, mostly) to do it.

It was that exchange which ultimately inspired this book. And although that conversation reflected a major change in my attitude and thinking, Stewart recently admitted that his recollection of that discussion was a little hazy; clearly, the event could hardly be described as life-changing for him.

I remember that earlier in the day on which that conversation took place, I had been standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes, and for the first time in 20 months I wasn’t resenting what I was doing and wondering why was it me who had to do this. I accepted that this was part of my job now. For the previous 20 months I had been immersed in confusion, mostly about my new status, both in the world and in my relationship. I was confused about having to do so much more of what had previously been shared tasks, but even more about the sudden and abrupt end of my freedom. I was either stuck at home or had a child attached to me on a permanent basis. Everywhere I went I took not only my baby, but also nappies and wipes and changes of clothes for her, and changes of clothes for me, and later on a little esky bag which contained milk and biscuits and a water cup, all of which had to be prepared every time we stepped out the door.

And what really ate away at me initially was that I was totally sure my husband just didn’t get it, as he would kiss me goodbye in the morning and take off for work. I would look through the window after him as I stood holding our baby, full of resentful resignation. For me to do what he just did would take hours of organisation. He couldn’t possibly understand how severe the impact of suddenly losing almost total freedom was – just as I couldn’t possibly have imagined it before I became a mother. We were both besotted with our new baby girl, but my life had changed dramatically, while the life of the adult I lived with had not.

In that supposedly wonderful and exhilarating post-baby phase, I began to feel not only confused, but also less understood by my partner. The differences between us were growing; our experiences of parenthood diverged dramatically right from the start.

Our conversations became fragmented, emotional and humourless. They became less about understanding and more about logistics. They changed from being supportive and encouraging to being spiteful gripe-fests. When I eventually came to accept my new role and was able to talk about it with him, our lives stopped diverging, the battleground ceased to exist and I started to feel that we were in this together.

A number of factors got me to the point of accepting my role as a mother:

• Stewart, (a farmer) had been tremendously supportive during my 10 weeks of morning sickness with my second pregnancy, and I believe he really tried to empathise with my situation. He has always been very involved and extremely helpful. He was my sole carer in the week following the birth of each of our children (we chose to homebirth on both occasions). I don’t think I changed a nappy for the first few days after Heidi was born, and I vividly remember when she was a week old, being freaked out as he told me he really should ‘get outside and do a few jobs today’. I eventually discovered that the issues, for me, were less about how much he was doing (although I needed him to be involved and contributing) and more about me coming to terms with the changes in my life.

• We arranged for me to have some financial independence. I had been used to having that and wasn’t coping with feeling that I needed to justify any personal expenditure. The ‘I am working too, I’m just not being paid’ thing just didn’t seem to work. And I was getting sick of having to hide any purchases that I couldn’t think up a reason for. I was tired of feeling like a naughty child every time I bought something. I had become the child and my partner had become the parent in our relationship, and this accentuated my feelings of inferior status and inequality.

• And third, acknowledgment that what I now did was my new ‘job’. This acceptance was fundamental, and in speaking with other women while researching this book, I noticed that it was something most women seemed to eventually experience. Most women get to a point where they stop seeing their partner as the solution and start to take responsibility for their own happiness. I had resented suddenly having to do all the cooking, washing, ironing, cleaning, grocery shopping, and most of the child-minding and parenting, but eventually I recognised that these tasks were part of my new ‘job’. While Stewart was out fencing or drenching cattle, I was also ‘at work’.

Being a mother is a 24/7 job; it demands many more hours than a full-time paid job. In my view, it isn’t fair for one parent to take on that complete burden. Parenting is a shared domain, and Stewart and I do share the ‘out of work hours’ childcare. He has always been 100 per cent in agreement with that. I do most of the ‘during the day’ stuff, but Stewart helps through the nights, in the mornings and in the evenings and also on the weekends. He works all day, but so do I. Occasionally we get a babysitter and I help him with some cattle work for the day, which is a wonderful treat for both of us (I think!).

The other fundamental is that he also has a role in our family. His role is to be the primary financial provider, and I do not envy him that responsibility. I appreciate that if I ask too much of him, his ability to do his job will be compromised. So when I start resenting the fact that he is not helping me more, I now respond to that inner dialogue with, ‘Well the more time he spends helping me, the less time he has to devote to our business and ultimately our financial wellbeing.’

Stewart cooks every Wednesday night (at least). That’s a night off for me and a chance to use some different skills for him. It has also been his choice to wash his own clothes (apparently I dye things or don’t get things clean enough or don’t check for tissues or something), empty the dishwasher each morning (and again, when he’s really busy, I’m happy to do it) and we share the kitchen cleaning up after dinner.

The other major element in the two of us getting the parenting experience we want is that we each have time away from parenting for at least a few nights each year.

In hindsight, he has not changed much since our ‘transforming’ conversation. He is pretty much doing what he has always done. What has changed since that conversation is that our relationship is converging rather than diverging; we are enjoying being parents and we are re-experiencing the sparkle of our pre-baby days. We enjoy the time we spend together – and we make spending time together a priority.

The essential factors which have enabled us to get to that point are: his significant involvement in parenting; our frequent ad hoc conversations and negotiations about tasks and routines; and my feeling that things between us are basically fair. The fact that we are sharing the responsibility for our children means I feel understood. We still have the occasional tiff – if he turns up three hours late or I overlook his needs or contribution – but we both understand why those things are an issue for the other person.

When I first started talking more openly with friends about the changes in my life post-baby, they all agreed that it was a transforming time not only for themselves, but also for their relationships. It became overwhelmingly apparent that we had all gone through a similar experience post-baby and most of us were still struggling with it. Our generation of women is used to opportunities and equality, so it comes as a shock when decades of women’s liberation seem to vanish with the birth of our first child.

While we all adore our new babies, we don’t expect having a baby to cost us our freedom and equality. Perhaps the greatest humiliation (and it is humiliation!) is suddenly having to ask our partner to help if we want even a few minutes to do something without the baby – housework or cooking a meal or having a shower. Suddenly we are dependent and restricted beings.

I began the research for this book when instinct told me that my experience was extremely common, and yet undocumented. I developed questionnaires and began interviewing friends. When that became too uncomfortable I went further afield, sourcing details of couples with children from numerous colleagues and friends. The questionnaires I used are included in the appendices of this book. I also interviewed stay-at-home dads, separated men and women and relationship counsellors and psychologists. This book is based on formal and informal interviews with nearly 100 people. Apart from the professional psychologists and relationship counsellors, all identities have been concealed and real names have not been used.

This book is about the impact of children on a couple’s relationship. It is not about babies and how to get them to sleep or what to feed them or how to prepare them for the arrival of a new sibling. All those issues are major, and a lot has been written about them. This book is about the changes that take place in us and the changes that occur in our relationship with our partner when we become parents. It is not a self-help book written by a professional therapist. It is written by a wife and mother, and draws on the wealth of experience of mums and dads all around the country. This book is not about men-bashing. In fact, many dads have been interviewed during the course of my research.

My intention is to create a book that is helpful for couples, a book that explores and explains the personal and relationship changes that take place after a baby is born and provides some useful information about how couples can avoid the personal and relationship traumas that go with parenthood. It does this largely by drawing on the experiences of couples and finding out what they have done to improve things post-baby.

And finally, this book is not about wanting sympathy. It is about wanting empathy and understanding from our partners, and giving the same back to them. It is about trying to recreate, in the post-kids phase, the equality in the relationship that existed in the pre-kids phase.

A few months into working on this book, I was listening as my husband explained to a friend exactly what it was about:

Well, you see, what happens is ... you marry this great girl and she’s really fun and independent and earns lots of money and she’s relaxed and spontaneous and is no more or less hormonal than the next person and wants lots of sex ... and then she has a baby ... and wow ... suddenly she has hormones going crazy and is in a foul mood a lot of the time and never wants sex and has no money and whinges about that and makes lots of demands ... and is never happy...

That was when I decided I needed to include men in the book. I had no idea that from his perspective, our relationship had changed quite so much!

Statistics show that nearly one in three Australian couples gets divorced; many of these are couples with young children. I have also included their stories to show what can happen when one or both partners lacks the awareness, commitment or desire to invest in their parenting partnership. The book would not be complete without hearing from them, about that painful end to a dream. While it has been the most difficult part of the book to write, I owe them especially. I hope that what they have to say will snap all of us out of our relationship complacency and remind us to honour and cherish our family ideal. Many relationships die through pure neglect. In the post-baby phase, chaos with children can make us blind to the slow deterioration of our personal life. The wake-up call is often sudden, cold and final. There is no such thing as a happy separation. Many people in this book have regrets about what they didn’t do in that post-baby phase or what they would do differently if they only had a second chance. While it is too late for many of them, their insights are golden eggs for the rest of us.

My husband stepped into the primary carer role for three weeks while I finished the first draft of this book. As the days proceeded, I adored going into the living room for a few precious moments of play with my children while they were in his care, knowing I could get up and leave at any moment without having to say a word to anyone. I dipped into their lives while still being firmly bound to the outside world. I was stepping in for as long as I wanted and then I was free to go. For three weeks, I experienced what it is like to be a father, a man with kids! For the first week I thought, ‘Wow, it is blissful being a father – to have all the joy and no responsibility (at least during work hours), to be able to slip in and out without negotiating, to have my freedom back.’

But as the weeks passed, I began to miss my mother role. I missed the constant chatter and questions. I missed being educated by my 3-year-old (‘Mummy, did you know that dogs eat feathers?’), the giggling, the singing, the dancing. When we get through all the post-baby agony and begin to fully value ourselves and cherish our roles, motherhood is the best job in the world. I couldn’t be a full-time mum, but I do need to spend way more than half my week with my children. Much to my surprise, I don’t want an au pair in the house playing with my kids. I don’t want a nanny. I want my kids to look back and remember me playing with them, me taking their concerns seriously, me knowing their likes and dislikes, me knowing those little things about them that nobody else in the world knows. I want to be a totally present mum. My children are simply scrumptious, and that is more than I can say about any telephone or notebook. No matter how great my urge to write is, my kids and my partner come first and I want them to know that. As Joanne Fedler writes in Secret Mothers’ Business (2006), ‘What else is more worth doing in this lifetime than loving little people?’

Agreement that mothering our children is a privilege and a blessing doesn’t, however, mean that we also consent to becoming subservient beings, conforming to the desires of those around us and losing ourselves in the process. We can happily accept the changes that children will make to our lives, but should we also blindly accept the stereotype that accompanies that role? If we let ourselves slip into that stereotype when we become mothers, without questioning what it says about us and what we do, we will end up doing it all, becoming a slave to our partner and children – and they will value us as we value ourselves.

Julia Baird, in her column in the Sydney Morning Herald ’s Good Weekend on 3 June 2006, wrote that the feminist movement resulted from women suffering economic dependence, restlessness and the frustration of talents unused. Surprisingly, almost every mother today can relate to those feelings. Most of us think that feminism’s battles have been fought and that the war is over, but with the birth of our first baby we discover that in fact that is not true.

But this new battle is as much a battle within ourselves as with our male partner. Are we better mothers if we feel oppressed or stifled? Clearly not. If we want to be great parents, but we’re not happy in ourselves or within our relationship, we have some work to do.

And finally, writing is both a creative endeavour and a form of action. I find it incredibly difficult to satisfy my personal standards as far as the former is concerned when my desire to be with my children pulls at me constantly. So I, like everyone, arrive at a compromise: the creative element of this work is not entirely satisfactory to me (I can live with the imperfections), but the action element may be. Through this book I hope to inspire and create change. I believe that couples need to be made aware of what the post-baby pitfalls are and how to climb out of them, so for me, if just one couple can get something from these pages, it will have been worth it.

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What conversation?

In my research for this book I interviewed many women and men, some new to parenting and some with several children and therefore several years under their belts, about their experiences of relationship issues post-baby. I included city and rural couples and people from a diverse range of professions and careers. I interviewed parents who stayed at home full-time, and parents who were in paid work either part-time or full-time.

Perhaps the most astonishing revelations were: first, that in the majority of situations, couples assume the traditional roles of the male provider and the female carer; and second, that the majority of couples do not have conversations about their new roles and responsibilities – about who will do what, what support they might need, or the many other issues that arrive with children – either before the baby is born or afterwards.

Until children, the lives of men and women are similar in many ways. There is not much the boys do that we girls can’t attempt. Many of us begin married life or a relationship having fun, enjoying our carefree life and thinking that things will only get better. We often have very independent lives, lives that are busy and full.

Many of us yearn to become parents and we are excited when it finally happens. We envisage that having a baby will be a beautiful bonding, a united endeavour.

It comes as a surprise to many that parenthood takes some getting used to. Not only do we need to learn the ropes of caring for our new baby; also, there is the double whammy of personal and relationship transformation. Both our personal identity and our relationship go through a post-baby crisis, as the traditional gender stereotypes we have only read about in history books begin to not only define who we are becoming as women and men, but also recast the balance of power in our relationship.

While a massive biological and culturally imposed transformation occurs for women with the birth of a child, no comparable change occurs for men. Female biology comes into play during pregnancy, labour and breastfeeding, and as a result, a woman’s experience of that time is radically different from that of her male partner.

Couples need to develop a relationship that respects and appreciates these differences. Couples may need to accept that many of the peaks they climb in the future may be peaks they’ll climb